Shunyu Liu (刘顺宇)

Research Scientist

Alibaba-NTU Global e-Sustainability CorpLab (ANGEL)
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore

Email: shunyu.liu.cs at gmail dot com

[Google Scholar] [GitHub]

Biography

I am currently a research scientist at Nanyang Technological University, working with Prof. Dacheng Tao. Before that, I received the Ph.D. degree from the College of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University in 2024, advised by Prof. Mingli Song and Prof. Chun Chen, and received the B.Eng. degree in Software Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University in 2019.

My research interests include multi-agent learning, reinforcement learning and efficient LLM agents. Applications of my work include autonomous power system control, as well as applications in other decision-making domains. The long-term goal of my research is to develop efficient, generalized, and practical agents. In tandem with this, my research strives to facilitate intelligent interaction among multiple agents, empowering them to tackle complex decision-making challenges in both the virtual and real worlds.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in my research :)

News

[Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by ICLR 2025.
[Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by WWW 2025.
[Jan 2025] One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
[Dec 2024] One paper was accepted by Expert Systems With Applications.
[Dec 2024] Four papers were accepted by AAAI 2025.
[Nov 2024] One paper was accepted by KDD 2025 Applied Data Science Track.
[Sep 2024] One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2024.
[May 2024] One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
[May 2024] Two papers were accepted by KDD 2024.
[May 2024] One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[Show more]

Highlight Publications

^* denotes equal contribution, and ^✉ denotes the corresponding author.

A2PO: Towards Effective Offline Reinforcement Learning from an Advantage-aware Perspective
Yunpeng Qing, Shunyu Liu^✉, Jingyuan Cong, Kaixuan Chen, Yihe Zhou, Mingli Song
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024
[arXiv] [Code]

Temporal Prototype-Aware Learning for Active Voltage Control on Power Distribution Networks
Feiyang Xu^*, Shunyu Liu^*✉, Yunpeng Qing, Yihe Zhou, Yuwen Wang, Mingli Song
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Unveiling Global Interactive Patterns across Graphs: Towards Interpretable Graph Neural Networks
Yuwen Wang, Shunyu Liu^✉, Tongya Zheng, Kaixuan Chen, Mingli Song
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Interaction Pattern Disentangling for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Shunyu Liu, Jie Song^✉, Yihe Zhou, Na Yu, Kaixuan Chen, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)^#, 2024
^# Top-tier Journal in Artificial Intelligence.
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Transmission Interface Power Flow Adjustment: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach based on Multi-task Attribution Map
Shunyu Liu^*, Wei Luo^*, Yanzhen Zhou, Kaixuan Chen, Quan Zhang, Huating Xu, Qinglai Guo, Mingli Song^✉
IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (TPS)^#, 2024
^# Top-tier Journal in Power Systems.
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Contrastive Identity-Aware Learning for Multi-Agent Value Decomposition
Shunyu Liu^*, Yihe Zhou^*, Jie Song^✉, Tongya Zheng, Kaixuan Chen, Tongtian Zhu, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023, Oral
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Preprints

For the most up-to-date list, please visit my Google Scholar.

R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization
Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang^✉, Huanjin Yao, Shunyu Liu, Xikun Zhang, Shijian Lu, Dacheng Tao
arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.12937, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

A Survey of Direct Preference Optimization
Shunyu Liu, Wenkai Fang, Zetian Hu, Junjie Zhang, Yang Zhou, Kongcheng Zhang, Rongcheng Tu, Ting-En Lin, Fei Huang, Mingli Song, Yongbin Li, Dacheng Tao^✉
arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.11701, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Parallelized Planning-Acting for Efficient LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
Yaoru Li, Shunyu Liu^✉, Tongya Zheng, Mingli Song
arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.03505, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Dynamic Parallel Tree Search for Efficient LLM Reasoning
Yifu Ding, Wentao Jiang, Shunyu Liu, Yongcheng Jing, Jinyang Guo, Yingjie Wang, Jing Zhang, Zengmao Wang^✉, Ziwei Liu, Bo Du, Xianglong Liu^✉, Dacheng Tao^✉
arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.16235, 2025
[arXiv]

Reasoning with Reinforced Functional Token Tuning
Kongcheng Zhang, Qi Yao, Baisheng Lai, Jiaxing Huang, Wenkai Fang, Dacheng Tao, Mingli Song, Shunyu Liu^✉
arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.13389, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search
Huanjin Yao^*, Jiaxing Huang^*✉, Wenhao Wu, Jingyi Zhang, Yibo Wang, Shunyu Liu, Yingjie Wang, Yuxin Song, Haocheng Feng, Li Shen, Dacheng Tao
arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.18319, 2024
[arXiv] [Code]

Odyssey: Empowering Minecraft Agents with Open-World Skills
Shunyu Liu^*, Yaoru Li^*, Kongcheng Zhang^*, Zhenyu Cui^*, Wenkai Fang^*, Yuxuan Zheng, Tongya Zheng, Mingli Song^✉
arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.15325, 2024
[arXiv] [Code]

A Survey on Explainable Reinforcement Learning: Concepts, Algorithms, Challenges
Yunpeng Qing, Shunyu Liu, Jie Song, Huiqiong Wang^✉, Mingli Song
arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.06665, 2022
[arXiv] [Code]

Publications

^* denotes equal contribution, and ^✉ denotes the corresponding author.

2025

From GNNs to Trees: Multi-Granular Interpretability for Graph Neural Networks
Jie Yang, Yuwen Wang, Kaixuan Chen, Tongya Zheng, Yihe Zhou, Zhenbang Xiao, Ji Cao, Mingli Song, Shunyu Liu^✉
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
[Paper] [Code]

Disentangled Condensation for Large-scale Graphs
Zhenbang Xiao, Yu Wang, Shunyu Liu, Bingde Hu, Huiqiong Wang^✉, Mingli Song, Tongya Zheng
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Curricular Subgoals for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Shunyu Liu^*, Yunpeng Qing^*, Shuqi Xu, Hongyan Wu, Jiangtao Zhang, Jingyuan Cong, Tianhao Chen, Yunfu Liu, Mingli Song^✉
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), 2025
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Utilizing RBC System for Taxation Policy Evaluation: An Adaptive Interaction Framework based on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Shuang Luo, Shunyu Liu, Tianrun Cai, Chao Wu^✉
Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA), 2025
[Paper]

CADP: Towards Better Centralized Learning for Decentralized Execution in MARL
Yihe Zhou, Shunyu Liu^✉, Yunpeng Qing, Tongya Zheng, Kaixuan Chen, Jie Song, Mingli Song
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) Extended Abstract, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Holistic Semantic Representation for Navigational Trajectory Generation
Ji Cao, Tongya Zheng^✉, Qinghong Guo, Yu Wang, Junshu Dai, Shunyu Liu, Jie Yang, Jie Song, Mingli Song
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

Disentangled Table-Graph Representation for Interpretable Transmission Line Fault Location
Na Yu, Yutong Deng, Shunyu Liu, Kaixuan Chen^✉, Tongya Zheng, Mingli Song
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

Cooperative Policy Agreement: Learning Diverse Policy for Offline MARL
Yihe Zhou, Yuxuan Zheng, Yue Hu, Kaixuan Chen, Tongya Zheng, Jie Song, Mingli Song, Shunyu Liu^✉
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

Agent-Aware Training for Agent-Agnostic Action Advising in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Yaoquan Wei, Shunyu Liu^✉, Jie Song, Tongya Zheng, Kaixuan Chen, Yong Wang, Mingli Song
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025
[arXiv]

Powerformer: A Section-adaptive Transformer for Power Flow Adjustment
Kaixuan Chen^*, Wei Luo^*, Shunyu Liu^✉, Yaoquan Wei, Yihe Zhou, Yunpeng Qing, Quan Zhang, Jie Song, Mingli Song
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Applied Data Science Track, 2025
[arXiv] [Code]

2024

Learning a Mini-batch Graph Transformer via Two-stage Interaction Augmentation
Wenda Li^*, Kaixuan Chen^*, Shunyu Liu^*, Tongya Zheng, Wenjie Huang, Mingli Song^✉
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2024
[arXiv] [Code]

Spatiotemporal-Augmented Graph Neural Networks for Human Mobility Simulation
Yu Wang, Tongya Zheng^✉, Shunyu Liu, Kaixuan Chen, Zunlei Feng, Yunzhi Hao, Mingli Song
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Simple Graph Condensation
Zhenbang Xiao, Yu Wang, Shunyu Liu, Huiqiong Wang^✉, Mingli Song, Tongya Zheng
European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Improving Adversarial Robustness via Feature Pattern Consistency Constraint
Jiacong Hu, Jingwen Ye, Zunlei Feng^✉, Jiazhen Yang, Shunyu Liu, Xiaotian Yu, Lingxiang Jia, Mingli Song
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv]

Multi-Agent Continuous Control with Generative Flow Networks
Shuang Luo, Yinchuan Li^✉, Shunyu Liu, Xu Zhang, Yunfeng Shao, Chao Wu^✉
Neural Networks (NN), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv]

COLA: Cross-city Mobility Transformer for Human Trajectory Simulation
Yu Wang, Tongya Zheng^✉, Yuxuan Liang, Shunyu Liu, Mingli Song
International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2024
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Progressive Decision-Making Framework for Power System Topology Control
Shunyu Liu, Yanzhen Zhou, Mingli Song^✉, Guangquan Bu, Jianbo Guo, Chun Chen
Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA), 2024
[Paper]

2023

Lookaround Optimizer: k steps around, 1 step average
Jiangtao Zhang, Shunyu Liu, Jie Song^✉, Tongtian Zhu, Zhengqi Xu, Mingli Song
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Adversarial Erasing with Pruned Elements: Towards Better Graph Lottery Ticket
Yuwen Wang^*, Shunyu Liu^*, Kaixuan Chen^*, Tongtian Zhu, Ji Qiao, Mengjie Shi, Yuanyu Wan^✉, Mingli Song
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2023
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Ask-AC: An Initiative Advisor-in-the-Loop Actor-Critic Framework
Shunyu Liu, Kaixuan Chen, Na Yu, Jie Song, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song^✉
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems (TSMC), 2023
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Improving Expressivity of GNNs with Subgraph-specific Factor Embedded Normalization
Kaixuan Chen^*, Shunyu Liu^*, Tongtian Zhu^*, Ji Qiao, Yun Su, Yingjie Tian, Tongya Zheng, Haofei Zhang, Zunlei Feng, Jingwen Ye^✉, Mingli Song
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Message-passing Selection: Towards Interpretable GNNs for Graph Classification
Wenda Li^*, Kaixuan Chen^*, Shunyu Liu, Wenjie Huang, Haofei Zhang, Yingjie Tian, Yun Su, Mingli Song^✉
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Tiny Papers Track, 2023
[Paper] [arXiv]

Distribution Knowledge Embedding for Graph Pooling
Kaixuan Chen, Jie Song, Shunyu Liu, Na Yu, Zunlei Feng, Gengshi Han, Mingli Song^✉
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2023
[Paper] [arXiv] [Code]

Awards & Honors

Awards & Scholarship

Outstanding Graduate, Zhejiang University, 2024.
Chen Tianzhou Scholarship, Zhejiang University, 2023.
Outstanding Ph.D. Student Scholarship, Zhejiang University, 2021.
Outstanding Graduate Student Award, Zhejiang University, 2020, 2021, 2023.
National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, 2018.
Outstanding Undergraduate Student Scholarship, Sun Yat-sen University, 2016, 2017, 2018.

Competition

Ranked 2nd in "China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition Innovation Challenge (Zhejiang)", 2024
Ranked 3rd in "Power System Dispatching AI Application Competition", China Southern Power Grid, 2023.
Ranked 3rd in "Power System Dispatching AI Application Competition", China Southern Power Grid, 2022.
Ranked 5th in "L2RPN Challenge - Energies of the Future and Carbon Neutrality", WCCI, 2022.
Ranked 9th in "Advanced Power System AI Application Competition", State Grid Corporation of China, 2022
Meritorious Winner in "Mathematical Contest in Modeling", COMAP, 2018.

Academic Services

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
Information Sciences (INS)
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS)
International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems (IJEPES)

Conference Reviewer

ICML 2025, ICLR 2025, KDD 2025, NeurIPS 2024, KDD 2024, ICLR 2023, ECAI 2023

Last updated on March 2025. Webpage template borrowed from Prof. Sida Peng.